False alarm

Monday, May 13, 2013

The news was gleefully shouted from the rooftops. Global-warming carbon dioxide has hit the highest levels in human history!

Alarmist media, academics, environmental activists and power-enhancing politicians and government officials all but took to dancing in the streets. The unsubtle subtext of the hoo-ha was roughly as follows:

“See there, we ARE on the brink of climate catastrophe. Drastic action IS urgent. We DO need more interventionist governmental policies to regulate energy production and consumption — i.e., bigger, more activist bureaucracy (therefore, higher taxes and/or higher debt); higher electricity and gasoline costs to discourage consumption; and more costly alternatives (wind, solar), which, since they aren’t remotely equal to energy demand, will hobble the economy even more than it’s already hobbled.”

This, of course, is the fine-print disclosure of global-warming alarmism’s side effects — much like the side effects glided over by fast-talking announcers in those pharmaceutical TV ads.

But in all the excitement over the news, a key component of the story — maybe THE key component — was either ignored due ignorance or suppressed due to ideological agendas. Namely, this:

If human-created carbon dioxide (actually a very small portion of total carbon dioxide created by nature) is at its highest level in human history and is the cause of global warming, why then is Planet Earth in a 10-year-plus cooling trend? Does global warming take an extended sabbatical like the tenured professors?

The Associated Press story and other coverage noted that the last time there was this high a level of carbon dioxide was 10 million to 2 million years ago. Back in the day, when reporters were reporters as opposed to publicists for environmental activism, a journalist would have said:

“Hey, hold on here. Ten to 2 million years ago there were no SUVS, no coal-fired power plants — indeed no human beings. So what caused global warming back then? How do we know that whatever caused it back then isn’t causing it today, or at least playing a significant role in it?”

The answer is, of course, we don’t know — experts like Barack Obama and Albert Gore to the contrary notwithstanding.

Consider the thoughts — as most of the coverage chose not to — of William Happer and Harrison H. Schmitt. No, they are not two knuckle-dragging, slope-browed, far-out right-wing anti-science “deniers.” Happer is a Princeton University physics professor and former director of energy research for the U.S. Department of Energy. Schmitt, a former astronaut and U.S. senator, is an adjunct professor of engineering at the University of Wisconsin. In the Wall Street Journal they recently wrote:

“The cessation of observed global warming for the past decade or so has shown how exaggerated NASA’s and most other computer predictions of human-caused warming have been — and how little correlation warming has with concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide. As many scientists have pointed out, variations in global temperatures correlate much better with solar activity and with complicated cycles of the oceans and atmosphere.”

As Paul Harvey used to say on the radio, “Now you know the rest of the story.” Or at least a little bit more of it.